The Science of Interruptions In 2000, Gloria Mark was hired as a professor at the University of California. She would arrive at her desk in the morning, full of energy and ready to tackle her to-do list. No sooner had she started one task than a colleague would e-mail her with an urgent request when she went to work on that, the phone would ring. At the end of the day, Mark had accomplished a fraction of what she set out to do. Lots of people complain that office multitasking drives them nuts. But Mark studies how high-tech devices affect our behavior, so she was able to do more than complain: She set out to measure how nuts we've all become. She watched cubicle (办公室隔间) dwellers as they surfed the chaos of modern office life and found each employee spent only ten-and-a-half minutes on any given project before being interrupted. Each short project was itself fragmented into three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages or working on a sheet. Mark's study also revealed that interruptions are often crucial to office work. The high-tech workers admitted that many of their daily distractions were essential to their jobs. When someone forwards you an urgent e-mail message, it's often something you really do need to see if a mobile phone call breaks through, it might be the call that saves your hide. For some computer engineers and academics, this realization has begun to raise an attractive possibility: Perhaps we can find an ideal middle ground. If high-tech work distractions are inevitable, maybe we can re-engineer them so we receive all of their benefits but few of their downsides. The Birth of Multitasking The science of interruptions began more than 100 years ago with the emergence of telegraph operators — the first high-stress, time-sensitive information-technology jobs. Psychologists discovered that if someone spoke to a telegraph operator while he was keying a message, the operator was more likely to make errors. Later, psychologists determined that whenever workers needed to focus on a job that required the monitoring of data, presentation was all important. Using this knowledge, cockpits (驶舱) for fighter pilots were carefully designed so that each dial and meter could be read with just a glance. Still, such issues seemed remote from the lives of everyday workers. Then, in the 1990s, computers began to experience a rapid increase in speed and power. 'Multitasking' was born instead of simply working on one program for hours at a time, a computer user works on several simultaneously. Office workers now stare at computer screens of overwhelming complexity, as they juggle (操纵) messages, text documents, PowerPoint presentations and web browsers. In the modern office we are all fighter pilots. Effect of Multitasking: Computer-affected Behavior Information is no longer a scarce resource — attention is. 20 years ago, an office worker had two types of communication technology: a phone, which required an instant answer, and postal mail, which took days. Now people have dozens of possibilities between these two poles. The result is something like 'continuous partial attention', which makes us so busy keeping an eye on everything that we never fully focus on anything. This can actually be a positive feeling, inasmuch as the constant email dinging makes us feel needed and desired. But what happens when you take that to the extreme? You get overwhelmed. Sanity lies in danger. In 1997, Microsoft recruited Mary Czerwinski, who once worked in NASA's Human-computer Interaction Lab, to conduct basic research to find out how computers affect human behavior. She took 39 office workers and installed software on their computers that would record every mouse click. She discovered that computer users were as restless as hummingbirds. On average, they juggled eight windows at the same time. More astonishing